Deadyard.org Allows You To Bury Abandoned Web Projects

January 22, 2009

deadyardFrequent Nashville Twitter user and social media voice Nathan Baker recently lamented at the number of domains he had purchase for great Web site ideas. The problem with this, he said (paraphasing), is that the sites were either unfinished, un-updated or otherwise abandoned.

So of course this took the form of yet another Web site idea — deadyard, which collects tweets (twitter messages) about web sites that have otherwise died for one reason or another. Cleverly, Nate anticipated some resistance to the whole Web sites aren’t really alive so they can’t really die criticism so he’s asking others to take the first step: admitting you’ve got a bad idea on your hands.

From deadyard: “Your site is dead. Bury it and find closure. Say a few words to put it in deadyard.”

To gain closure, visit deadyard’s Twitter page and say a few words. Nate got the ball rolling with the first message. (I’m still coping with a few of my losses).


TinyWTF – Why aren’t you using URLzen?

January 11, 2009

urlzen-logoURLzen is a URL shorten-er in the same vein as the default TinyURL and increasingly popular is.gd (is good) and ow.ly. These shortening sites just recently became useful due to Twitter, which only allows 140 characters to be sent per message.

But unlike the similar competitors, URLzen is unique in two distinct ways: A) It was created as a side project to help track the statistics of the original URL and B) it was produced locally here in the Nashville area.

statzen_logo_100Local developer and genius mind of the best iPhone game that hasn’t been released, Jackson Miller created the shorten-er while working on Statzen –  a site that promises to offer up blogger specific web statistics with a beautiful user interface. (I’ve seen screen shots. The Statzen team is going to deliver).

From the Statzen blog:

“A few months ago we decided to experiment with Google App Engine. We also wanted to scratch an itch that we had. So, in the course of about six hours we created Urlzen.com.”

Now many people will still probably say, “well URLzen is too many characters” and that is true compared to is.gd. But, consider this fellow Nashvillians:  We often talk about the city’s potential as the technology capital of the south, but what are each of us doing to help it along?

Jackson is one of the people that will help us achieve that future. TinyURL will not. So do us all a favor and switch to URLzen.

Thanks to Chuck Bryant for alerting me to URLzen months ago and also to Erin Cubert who indirectly gave me the idea to post something about it on this site. You guys rock!


Firefly Logic Isn’t Scared of Coding Facebook Apps

December 5, 2008

fireflylogicWhen geeks meet other geeks, lots of news is then discovered as being unreported – at least this is the scenario that played out tonight after attending Geek Social. The agenda-free gathering provided a small glimpse into the window of cool projects getting coded the folks working at Firefly Logic, who in addition to throwing intentionally vague meet-ups once a month, are leading the mid-state in homegrown iPhone apps.

Apparently the company has dabbled in Facebook applications as well with great success. By that I mean they made one. It was a platform that allowed country music fans to predict the winners of this year’s CMA awards. Typically, the short time span of the app’s release date (which I believe was only days/weeks before the show taped) would be the cause that prevented local media from picking up the story and running it as the lead in their business section. It certainly wouldn’t have appeared in their technology section because those don’t exist. And while that may be the case in this situation, there was no chance of me hearing about the Facebook app and why it was notable that they created one since no one blogged about it.

picture-3Personally, I hate Facebook’s initiative for developers to create web applications specific to their social networking site. But, I won’t deny that the site brings in a ridiculous amount of traffic each day and it would be dumb to ignore that. Most developers still don’t like the idea of producing an app for a web site because of the risk for failure and lack of revenue model. So the fact that Firefly Logic created an app for Facebook at all is newsworthy.

So why was the info not better circulated? Mostly because they aren’t familiar with how the media, both local and mainstream, work. When I asked Firefly Logic Partner and Senior Software Engineer Chris McPherson about it, he said it was because no one thought to do it. Having met a handful of others at the company, I have to say I do believe him. Those guys are definitely amazing geek-coders who enjoy their work and not media savvy journo-marketers.

Ideally, Firefly Logic does need a PR/media person who understands technology and tech culture keenly enough to create a buzz about accomplishments, like the Facebook app, that would no doubt drum up additional clients. But, they also need a PR person who understands how to frame those accomplishments for an ignorant local media. The need for such a position will only increase  as they take on additional projects, which trust me will happen soon enough [hint: more iPhone apps.]

They actually invited me over to their office tomorrow to hang out and talk shop. Definitely looking forward to it and being able to report some original news of the tech variety.


Nashville Should Have More Tech News (Part 1/2)

November 3, 2008

I’m sitting here trying to think of reasons why Nashville should have a buzzing technology scene that rivals Atlanta and gaining some serious footing towards what’s going on in Texas. I’m also trying to figure out why technology is largely ignored nearly the entire local media –and I don’t just mean using to it communicate.

In the past month I have met passionate business owners doing incredible things far bigger than the city that contains them. I’ve discovered an entire group of locals who share the same appreciation for the Internet and all its culture. I’ve seen innovation happening in my backyard that I’d previously only read about from Silicon Valley news blogs. Yet, through all of these new experiences, contacts, friends, etc., the only thing  to solidify inside my mind is a question: Is technology any more tethered to science than it is to business or culture?

No. Maybe it used to be tied to one category but now it encompasses a full ecology of news. The advertisements in technology are also the story. Science of technology is driven by market demand for better products and machines. Culture happens when we finally learn how to communicate through these new tools. I could interweave threads involving tech all night long, however, the point is technology is in a rare perfect harmony with itself.

So WTF Nashville? BarCamp should have been enough to wise us up [622 registered users via barcampnashville.com] to the reality that we’ve been ignoring a huge portion of human advancement. I know most people reading this will probably disagree immediately, but the truth is we’ve just barely scratched the surface with “un-conferences” and twittering.

I want more…

[Concluded in Part 2/2]


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